The first computer bug

The first computer bug

Once upon a time.... Growing up those words were the beginning of a great story. Stories have a way of taking us to different places in time; past, future or fiction the experience of being able to step outside ourselves and into the mind and world of another has always made storytelling enthralling.

Today I will tell a story of the first computer bug, some may have wondered why we refer to errors in computer code/programs as bugs, well, it dates back to the 9th of September, 1947. A team of scientists were programming and kept having issues with the performance of their code as "something" kept compromising it. It turns out that "something" was a moth.

Grace Hopper, a computer scientist was the first to document a bug in code and the rest they say is history. I find that a lot of terms that have become cultural norms were coined as a result of some historic event or context. I also believe that the examination of these terms can yield a lot of insight into the past, an example of one such cultural term is "wake/wake keep". I'll leave you to find out why we observe that.

Every developer hates bugs, there are two types basically; compile time bugs and runtime bugs. Compile time bugs are errors that result as a result of violating the principles, rules or conventions of the programming language you're using to code. These bugs are easier to detect (the ease of debug is another story entirely). Runtime bugs arise as a result of errors in the logic of your code which makes it so things you don't want it to do or return the wrong kind of result for operations you programmed into the computer. These bugs aren't as as easy to detect because the programming language has issues picking them up, the code obeys all laws of the language afterall. There's also the issue of what you think you wrote vs what you actually wrote. I do believe that these bugs are simpler to fix once you detect their source.